Human Suffering and Quality of Life: Conceptualizing Stories and Statistics

This briefs on human suffering adds to human understanding of suffering by contextualizing both stories and statistics on suffering, while showing that suffering adds a useful perspective to contemporary thought and research on quality of life, social well-being, and measures of societal progress. The scholarship on suffering is made more comprehensible in the book by using nine different conceptual frames that have been used for making sense of suffering. The primary focus of this work is with the last frame, the quality of life frame. Overall, this chapters show how the research on quality of life and well-being can be enhanced by embracing human suffering. ​

About the Author

Ronald (Ron) Anderson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD in sociology from Stanford University in 1970. From 1968 until retiring in 2005, he served on the faculty of sociology at the University of Minnesota. Throughout that time, he consulted for many government agencies and corporations on survey research and technology-related issues. From 1990 to 2005, he coordinated several international studies of the social and learning effects of information technology within primary and secondary education in 20 or more countries in each study. From that and earlier work, he wrote or edited seven books and over 100 articles. Since retirement, his research interests have focused primarily on compassion and suffering. Further details on his work can be found in the following websites:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Anderson

www.soc.umn.edu/~rea/

StopSuffering.net.